This paper focuses on clarifying the relationship between noise exposure and the prevalence of highly annoyed people due to transportation noise in Japan. The authors accumulated 34 datasets, which were provided by Socio-Acoustic Survey Data Archive and derived from the other surveys conducted in Japan. All the datasets include the following micro-data: demographic factors, exposure, and annoyance data associated with specific noise sources. We performed secondary analyses using micro-data and established the relationships between noise exposure (Lden) and the percentage of highly annoyed people (%HA) for the following noise source: road traffic, conventional railway, Shinkansen railway, civil aircraft, and military aircraft noises. Among the five transportation noises, %HA for the military aircraft noise is the highest, followed by civil aircraft noise and Shinkansen railway noise. The %HA for conventional railway noise was higher than that for road traffic noise. To validate the representativeness of the exposure–response curves, we have discussed factors affecting the difference in annoyance. In addition, comparing the Japanese relationship with that shown in the “Environmental Noise Guidelines for the European Region,” we revealed that Japanese annoyance is higher than the WHO-reported annoyance.

In order to investigate the effect of indoor sound environment in a classroom on learning efficiency, laboratory experiments were conducted. In the experiment, the percentage of correct answers of each task, subjective judgment on degree of disturbance and the power level of frontal midline theta rhythm (Fm�) were measured under the three types of sound environmental conditions (no-noise, air-conditioning noise, talking noise) in anechoic room. From the result, it was confirmed that the sound environment condition significantly change the percentage of correct answers, the subjective judgment on degree of disturbance and the power level of Fm� for listening task and proofreading (under the acoustical condition of signal to noise ratio (SNR) 0 dB). Furthermore, the possibility of improvement on learning efficiency by amplifying speech level was investigated. From the result, it was suggested that the amplification of speech signal level decrease the influence of sound environment in classrooms on learning efficiency.

The purpose of this study was to obtain data on the influence of sounds on disturbance and on electroencephalogram (EEG) results. The following experiments were conducted: The EEGs for ten subjects under mental tasks were measured with or without test sounds. After conducting measurements, the subjects were asked to evaluate the self-rated degree of disturbance they experienced on their tasks. In this experiment, four patterns of a 1000 Hz pure tone were presented to the subjects as test sounds, and a simple calculation task was also given as a mental task. From these experiments, we found that the patterns of test sounds had an actual influence on their self-rated degrees of disturbance, and disturbance by the test sounds were also related to the patterns. From these results, we tentatively theorize that, when the potential of Fm (i.e., frontal midline theta rhythm) becomes small, the self-rated degree of disturbance becomes large. Thus, it was suggested that the self-rated degree of disturbance was strongly associated with the loss of concentration on the task.

No abstract